


A Leisurely Afternoon Drown

by HoboButterfly



Category: Scrubs (TV)
Genre: Angst, Gen, Self-Harm, Suicide, Suicide Attempt, mention of self-harm, teen, teenage angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-09
Updated: 2016-06-09
Packaged: 2018-07-14 01:30:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,140
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7146623
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HoboButterfly/pseuds/HoboButterfly
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"So I decided to do it like Virginia Woolf; I walked into a lake and tried to drown myself. Got up early on a Saturday, put on my bikini..." Oneshot.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Leisurely Afternoon Drown

**Sometimes you just have to write about suicide while watching** **_Kangaroo Jack_ ** **, amirite?**

It was oddly empowering when Elliot Reid realized that she could just  _ stop  _ being alive. That she could just walk out on her parents, her “friends”, her brothers, instead of them walking out on her. That she could just leave. Not in the sense of giving up, of course... Okay, fine, maybe it was like giving up. But it’s not like Elliot cared. She would be dead before anyone found out she was a quitter. Plus, she wasn’t sure anyone actually cared about her enough to judge her for quitting. Except maybe her mother, but that was just because she  _ lived  _ to criticize, though not at all because she cared. Her mother was a big part of why she truly wanted to die, why she hated herself. The constant criticism just was too much; her mother was… Elliot still refused to use the term “abusive”...  but it was pretty bad. And her father, who, fine, neglected her, did a number on her self-esteem as well. Her youngest brother had just graduated and headed off to med school, leaving her utterly alone. And the fact that her own swim coach had engaged in… uh,  _ less-than-consensual sexual relations  _ with her sucked, to say the least. That was something she didn’t even want to think about.   

It’s not like she devoted herself to her death right after she realized suicide was a real option. It took a few months-- maybe a year-- of dabbling in suicidal thoughts. She spent a long time going through life with various ways to die floating around in her head at almost all times. Thinking of her own mortality was so appealing at times that it was almost addicting.

_ It’s all good. Just step in front of a bus. It’s nothing, Elliot, it’s nothing.  _

_ Well, if it’s  _ that  _ bad, you should just smash one of Mom’s wine bottles over your head as hard you possibly can. You probably deserve it anyway. _

_ Come on, Elliot. If you cut a tiny bit deeper and relocate from your stomach to your wrists, you could bleed out fairly quickly. It’s not that different from what you’re doing right now.  _

Oh, yeah. And there was the cutting. She spent years hating herself, so who the frick could blame her for taking it out on herself physically? It didn’t  _ really  _ do anything  _ that  _ bad. It didn’t take Elliot long to realize that if she just sliced lightly enough in the right places, her self-abuse wouldn’t even leave any legitimate scars that her mother could comment on. Just these linear, tan marks that were barely noticeable. The worst thing that could possibly happen is that she could contract Hepatitis B if the blade was unclean or bleed out if she cut too deep, but, hey, Elliot welcomed death. In fact, she often found herself hoping, hoping desperately, that something awful would happen to her. 

It took a while. There are stages that come with suicide, and by the time Elliot got to an actual attempt, there was barely enough of her left alive to kill. She didn’t care if she lived or died, she couldn’t enjoy a damn thing, and most of her time was devoted to thinking about how much she hated herself or wistfully fantasizing about the many ways she could possibly die.

It was that type of thinking which lead her to an actual attempt. Once she decided on the way she wanted to die, nothing could stop her. At first, she wanted to go like Sylvia Plath, her favorite poet, but every time she even let her head get near the oven, she came close to wetting herself, and she at very least wanted to be  _ not _ covered in her own urine when someone found her body. So, she chose to go like her second-favorite poet, Virginia Woolf. 

At first, drowning herself sounded a lot scarier and more painful than sticking her head in the oven, but she did like swimming and she lived not a mile away from this lake that would be a phenomenal place to die.

Good God, she didn’t want to be thinking like that. _A phenomenal place to die._ _What the frick? Who thinks like that?_ That was scary. Because of the slow, staging nature of suicidal thinking, it was hard for Elliot to discern where she actually should’ve started becoming seriously concerned and trying to, maybe, stop her constant longing for death. Of course, her father swore that therapists were the Devil incarnate and if she were to even suggest that she may need professional help, he would've disowned her or something. Still, she wouldn’t’ve seen a therapist anyway. She would truly rather die than continue to think like that for even a little bit longer.

So that's how Elliot ended up standing on the edge of the dock, dressed in a bright pink bikini at six-thirty in the morning in May, wondering just how bad drowning would really be.

She sat down on the dock, let her feet dangle into the water, trying not to think about how it would feel when that very water filled up her lungs and…

It was hard to get in the water. She spent two hours just sitting there numbly. Hell, she wasn’t even sad. She couldn’t even bring herself to be sad about  _ her own fricking death _ . But that’s what depression does. Depression fills you, overtakes you, and then eats you alive until there’s nothing left. Nothing but the incredible desire to  _ not be alive. _

So when Elliot finally stepped into the lake, water up to only her ankles, she didn’t give a damn about the fact that this was, hopefully, her last hour on Earth. She didn’t care that she hadn’t left a note ( _ weren’t suicide victims supposed to leave tell-all notes revealing the depth of their depression and their many confessions to all those who they loved oh-so-much?),  _ or that she hadn't even spoken to three out of four of her brothers in over a month. Hell, she didn't even care that her body was likely to be found completely waterlogged, swollen (much to her mother’s dismay, Elliot was sure), and mangled by the water. 

So she trudged through the shallow water, and when she easier far enough, dove under and swam farther into the lake than she ever had before. She was pretty sure that swimmers weren't even supposed to go out that far; it was so deep that the middle of the lake was for motorboats, paddlers, tubers, and water skiers only. Not that she cared. 

It was exactly because of this complete state of apathy that her own inability to stay underwater long enough to drown caught her off-guard. She ducked underwater, held her breath, and stayed under for a good minute before her body couldn't take it, her lungs burned, and she panicked. She  _ had _ to surface. But it wasn't because she's suddenly had some sort of life-changing epiphany or suddenly realized how amazing her life was, how many people loved her, or all the possibilities that the future could hold for her if she could just power through. It was nothing like that. She simply became uncomfortable, her body rattled because it was running out of oxygen, and in a blind, instinct-driven panic, she breached the water and drew another breath. 

So she tried again. And again. She tried to just inhale the water, do it quickly, but she just couldn't. Screw survival instincts. 

Still, Elliot was determined to end her life, so she resolved to exhaust herself until her body could fight no more. That, however, took time.

It was three o’clock before her vision began to blur. 

It was four o’clock when she stopped actually swimming and instead just treading water.

It was six o’clock when she could see almost nothing at all; the world was a void, interrupted in the center of view by a bleary sea. 

And all she could think was how she should've been dead long ago. 

Elliot could feel herself getting weaker, her halfhearted kicks at the water were barely enough to keep her above water; her face was barely exposed to the air.

_ THUD. _

Elliot was thrust underwater, hard, as her head exploded in pain. She floated back up slowly, but was struck back down with another overwhelmingly painful blow. Then it happened again. And again. 

Elliot was sure she was dead by the time she finally surfaced, head pounding and body too exhausted to move. Yet, somehow, she was being lifted out of the water.

_ Oh, God. This is it. I died, didn't I? This is real. I'm ascending.  _

That thought filled her with a tiny bit of warmth-- her own ascension was fulfilling and deserved and a long-awaited relief to her earthly, mortal problems that would soon seem so far away…

Her blissful, rambling thoughts about death were interrupted cruelly and suddenly by her very much  _ still alive  _ lungs, which convulsed, hard, to expel what seemed like ten gallons of lake water. It was then that she realized that she was on a boat and,  _ oh, dignifying, _ she was also hurling. 

As Elliot vomited up water and what she had thought at the time had been her last meal (dinner the night before: a medium-rare steak and a Caesar salad, both of which tasted considerably worse on their way back up,) she was able to focus her vision, just slightly, but enough to see the concerned faces of her high school's rowing team fixed on her.

_ Her _ , who was, just to recap, soaking wet, disheveled, exhausted, unkempt, and puking her guts out.  _ Phenomenal.  _ She should've just stick her head in the oven and let everyone get a glimpse of her humiliating bodily functions when she was dead.  _ Eh, too late now. _

“Miss Reid?” 

Elliot sat back, not comprehending the rowing coach’s call.

“Miss Reid, are you alright? Do I need to call an ambulance?”

Elliot opened her mouth, but all that came out were jumbled noises and some drool. She shook her head no instead. 

“Are you sure? Let me see your pupils.” The coach took hold of her face, and Elliot flinched at the memory of the last time a coach had touched her. “They look fine.” The coach sat back. “How many fingers?” 

“Three,” Elliot mumbled.

“Good. I think you're okay. Might want to see a doctor, though. What on Earth were you doing this far out in the water? It's dangerous.”

Elliot opened her mouth, shut it forlornly, then opened it again to speak. “Uh, I don't know. I was swimming… Guess I just w-wasn’t paying attention.” She set her jaw, gulped, and prayed the rowing team would believe her.

They did. “Well, be more careful next time, you could've gotten seriously injured. Or worse.”

God, she was praying for  _ or worse. _

“Sorry,” Elliot mumbled, feeling too terrible physically and mentally to really put any emotion into her unfeeling apology. 

“You look terrible. I'm taking you home.”

Elliot reluctantly agreed, feeling massively disappointed by the whole experience. When people’s suicide attempts fail, weren't they supposed to have some tremendous feeling of relief? Realize that they didn't want to die after all? She'd heard of that. She wished she'd had that moment, that all the parts of her that had been empty for so long would fill up with hope and relief and that she would rejoice… But instead, she was left just as tired and depressed as when she'd gone out that morning. 

Hell, the only reason she didn't try again the next morning was because she was too fatigued and headachey from the day before to drag herself back out to the lake. No, she'd have to settle for cutting herself open some more, for letting herself bleed and suffer and slowly become dead without actually dying...

**I don't really know what that was. I guess I just wanted to expand on that moment briefly talked about in “My Fishbowl”. Elliot strikes me as the kind of person who just be** **_drained_ ** **by depression, and probably take it all out on herself. Anyway… Did anyone even read this? Or are we in a “if an author writes a fic and no one is around to read it, does it make a sound?” sort of scenario. I'm sensing** **_Scrubs_ ** **is kind of a dead fandom. If it did make a sound, I sure hope it was a good one. I hope you enjoyed.**

**Oh, and also, am I wrong or does anyone else think that Charlie from** **_Kangaroo Jack_ ** **looks like Drake from** **_Drake and Josh_ ** **aged like 15 years? Also, wtf did I just watch?? And why did Netflix insist that** **_Orange is the New Black_ ** **fell under the category “More Like This”???**


End file.
